Live from Austin!

Crystal posts a link to a Boston Globe story about property prices in Massachusetts.

Houses here cost so much because there are too few of them for all the people who have been drawn to Boston because it’s such a great place for great minds to do great things. But that reputation, which has kept Boston competitive all these years, is beginning to buckle under the weight of absurd home prices. Even in a recession, Boston’s world-renowned hospitals, higher-education institutions, and biotech firms admit they are seeing their job offers turned down like never before, largely because of housing costs.

[...]

The Census Bureau says Cambridge is the city with the highest percentage of $1-million- plus single-family homes in the country. But this is a surprisingly recent phenomenon. Beaty has to go back only as far as 1986 to find Cambridge’s first million-dollar sale.

It’s the beginning of the end for Davis Square. Diesel only just survived being priced out, and there now appear to be two swanky upscale cocktail bars opening at once, each complete with chic frosted glass windows and ultra-modern designer furniture.

Meanwhile in Harvard Square, it’s so bad that the clothing chain stores like Abercrombie and Fitch are being priced out and replaced by boutiques selling Swiss watches.

An insightful comment from Robert Blatman, an obstetrician quoted in the Globe article:

“The crazy thing is, if I can’t afford to live in these areas, what about the teachers and the firemen? It really worries me that, at some point, this has to erode the quality of life that made the real estate around here so desirable in the first place.”

And that’s the problem. It’s not sustainable. As people making normal wages leave the state (10,000 a year on average), their homes go to developers and owner-speculators, not to another normal family. Ordinary businesses can’t get staff, because the only people within an hour’s commute who can survive on normal wages are the few still living with their parents. Which, in turn, means that everything from groceries to medical bills to utility bills gets jacked up 40% or more to compensate for the increased overheads.

So sooner or later, people start to look at their crummy 2 bedroom rented apartment with the rattling windows and chronic dust bunny infestation, and look at their bills, and then look at other parts of the country…and that’s why we’re leaving. Even if we had a million bucks, we wouldn’t be spending it to get a 2 bedroom house here. Cambridge is nice, but it’s not that nice.

Furthermore, it’s plain that the local powers-that-be aren’t going to do anything about the problem. If they’re lucky, the Boston metro area will turn into another Manhattan. If they’re unlucky, there will be a big crash. I don’t want to be around for either of those scenarios.

We were in Harvard Square a couple of weeks ago, and I got a sudden chocolate craving. We went into Cardullo’s in search of something other than American chocolate. Inside was a huge man. He wasn’t merely fat, he was clinically obese, huge, a gargantuan avalanche of flesh. He was carefully looking over the chocolate bars.

I almost walked straight out, and it gave me an idea. As a public health exercise to fight obesity, they could pay guys like that to stand around in candy stores and fast food joints, wearing T-shirts saying “AFTER”.

After a day of working from home, I had to get out of the computer room. I went to Harvard Square in search of a 2x mono 3.5mm jack to 1x stereo 3.5mm plug converter. I found one at Radio Shack, but it’s a blocky thing that won’t plug directly into the camcorder, so I need to either find a really short 3.5mm stereo headphone extension cable, or wire up my own converter.

Then I saw that HMV had reached the “40% off everything” stage of their “going out of business” sale. That took their overpriced $18.99 CDs to under my $12 limit, so I cleared out what was left of the Plaid, Komputer and Boards of Canada sections. The place was packed full of people, and the shelves are pretty empty of anything desirable at this point. (Off the top of my head: there’s no Pink Floyd, three Zappa CDs, no Autechre, most of the good Squarepusher has gone, no mu-Ziq, and now no Plaid or Boards of Canada either. Every Stanley Kubrick DVD is gone, ditto Terry Gilliam. Most of the Criterion Collection discs are gone.)

You know, every time a store has an actual sale with reasonable prices, I end up spending a ton of money. The rest of the time I buy nothing. I keep hoping that one day someone at the big media corporations will take a look at the sales figures and work out what’s going on. “Gee, if we cut the price of the CDs to $10-12, we sell five times as many, and if we cut the price to $8 we sell ten times as many.”

This HMV closedown is a pretty clear indication that it’s not just me, either. The Classical section was almost empty; 80% or more of the stock was gone. All they had to do was cut it to a reasonable price and it flew off the shelves. Cut the profit margin in half and sell ten times as many, and you make five times as much money. What is it with the record industry that they can’t see this? It makes me want to bang my head against a wall in frustration. Or even better, bang Hilary Rosen’s head against a wall…

I’ve bought a handful of tracks from the Apple Music Store. I’ve concluded that it does make sense, for a very limited purpose: buying one-off tracks where I would never buy anything else from the artist in question. For instance, I bought “Journey of the Sorcerer” by Eagles, because a quick audition told me there was nothing else I’d ever want to listen to on that album. (Or any of their others, as far as I could tell.)

Generally, though, I listen to entire albums, and the iTunes store just doesn’t make sense for albums. The quality’s too low, the restrictions are too annoying, and the price is too high. But spending 99 cents to get “Journey of the Sorcerer” instead of $12, that makes sense. Now, if only they’ll add the one interesting Andrew Lloyd Webber track (it’s about 3 minutes long), the one good track on Peter Baumann’s “Romance ’76”, and so on…

HMV coda

They still have shitloads of Yanni, however. Nothing’ll make that stuff shift.

Picked up negatives of San Francisco photos, scanned them. Treated myself to a can of Irn Bru found in Harvard Square. Did a bunch of other stuff I don’t remember, and suddenly it was late at night.

Yesterday was already going pretty badly when I started to get abdominal pain at around 16:00. It initially felt like indigestion, but so did my last kidney stone attack…

About twenty minutes later there was a wave of pain and nausea. I made it to the bathroom, rallied a little, but eventually had to give in and have a lengthy conversation on the big white telephone with Ralph and Hughie.

Let’s skip a little. You don’t need to know every detail of what it’s like to spend time lying on a corporate restroom floor, panting hard and trying not to scream.

Around 17:00 I was still in agony. I realized there was no way I could get home—I wasn’t capable of sitting on a train, far less walking to the station. I needed painkillers desperately. I wandered back towards the kitchen, where there used to be a first aid box. As I walked past the cube farm, I saw that Evija was still at work. I asked her if she had any painkillers. She had aspirin, or something else. I was vaguely aware that I was probably bleeding internally, so I opted for Something Else. Evija offered to drive me home. She got the car, and I met her outside the office.

It was cold outside, but I felt feverish. I began to shiver. I couldn’t understand why the pain hadn’t stopped—last time it was all over in half an hour. I wasn’t sure whether my situation justified a trip to the hospital, but I was fairly sure I couldn’t take much more of the pain.

I wasn’t sure what the rules were regarding hospitals and insurance. I remembered that sara had had investigative surgery at a hospital near Harvard Square, but in my confused mental state I couldn’t remember its name. After the car hit a couple of bumps and ended up behind a huge queue of cars, I realized that we could easily end up in traffic for an hour, and there was no way I could give directions. I could barely string three or four words together.

Mass General Hospital was just across the river, and it was really easy to get there. Evija did some crazy driving, and before I knew it we were there. The hospital staff brought out a wheelchair for me; I was shaking uncontrollably, presumably in shock.

Before long I was hooked up to a drip feed. Apparently I was severely dehydrated from hyperventilating. They gave me morphine, but it wasn’t enough to get rid of the pain, so they gave me 30mg of something else that I didn’t catch the name of because my head was swimming from the morphine…

There were lots of questions. I think I answered them all correctly. Questions about insurance, allergies, phone numbers… Blood was taken, and I lay there waiting for the drugs to kick in. Apparently the hospital said Evija couldn’t see me, and she called sara, who arrived as the pain was starting to ease.

The doctors wanted a urine sample. I was on the second intravenous drip before I felt that might be a realistic possibility. It turns out to be incredibly difficult to urinate while sitting on a metal trolley, listening to doctors discussing someone’s colostomy. When I finally managed it, there was a wait of an hour or so for the test results. The doctors decided I was safe to go home, though I still felt nauseous. We walked out and found a taxi.

The taxi driver’s cologne was so strong that sara had to open a window. I was concentrating on controlling my mounting nausea, and too busy to identify possible causes. We made it home, I staggered out of the taxi and got as far as the front door. Once inside I crashed into bed.

Several ibuprofen were enough to deaden the pain so I could get some sleep. This morning I made it to the pharmacy and picked up a prescription of Percocet—which I needed to do in person. If the pain comes back, I’m to take one, wait twenty minutes, and only take the second if I really really need to. (I gather that Percocet addicts often switch to heroin or other IV drugs.)

So, I’m spending the day in bed, drinking energy drinks and Gatorade and feeling as weak as a kitten. I think I’ll make some toast in a minute or two. Later on I have to contact my usual doctor and sort out some treatment for the kidney stone. Probably something involving lasers or sonic disruption.

My iMac just arrived, but I’m too tired to unpack it.

On Sunday, we walked into Dunkin’ Donuts in Harvard Square to get coffee. There were five Cambridge cops standing at the counter in front of us, in full uniform. I was really, really tempted to take a discreet photo, but I decided I didn’t fancy risking a beating.

Unfortunately, Harvard insisted that the Dunkin’ Donuts in the square not have the usual big pink and orange sign, otherwise I’d have gotten a great photo of four Harleys and a squad car parked outside.

Went to Twisted Village in Harvard Square and discovered way too many cheap CDs.

• Boards of Canada Geogaddi (2002). Meant to get it when it came out, but there was no way I was going to pay $17 for a CD. Picked it up for $8.99. Dunno if it’s used, but it’s in mint condition.
• Bang on a Can Industry (1995).
• Silica Gel 50) Noisy Children Party (1993)—A Seeland / Wifflefist co-release, so you know it has to be interesting.
• The Cosmic Forces of Mu (2002)—26 new exclusive tracks from Mike Paradinas’ Planet Mu record label, 2 CDs.
• King Crimson THRaKaTTaK (1996). Another one I intended to buy years ago but didn’t see for under $12 until today.

All were $9.99 or less. Also picked up Freeform Audiotourism Vietnam and China Reinterpretations (2002 I think). As far as I can tell, it’s audio sound recordings and photos from Vietnam and China, interactive software, plus a second CD of music built from those recordings by people including Bill Laswell and Autechre. Paid an outrageous $15.99 for it, but I figured it was more than just a CD, and I’d never see it again if I didn’t. (Quatermass Recordings, yeah right.)

Also picked up four CDs for under $10 each at HMV a week or two ago, so I now have lots of music and won’t let myself go near a CD store for some months.

I hate to think how much I’d spend on CDs if they were all $10 all the time. Thank goodness the fuckwits in the music industry keep jacking up the prices.

I gave in to temptation and got a set of binaural microphones. I’ve just been in Harvard Square recording ambient noise.

Binaural recording is designed for headphones. Traditionally, it required an artificial head with acoustic properties similar to a human head, with two omnidirectional microphones inside. Nowadays, reasonable quality microphone units can be made a lot smaller. My binaural mics use a real head—mine. They fit inside my ears, like in-ear headphones.

The advantage of binaural over stereo is that you get a full three-dimensional stereo image when you listen on headphones. You can actually hear whether sounds are in front of you or behind you. Reverberation echoes in large rooms are stunning. Right now I’m listening to the red line pull into the station…

I mostly sleep on my right side. The ear stud in my right ear has a rather nasty metal butterfly retaining thing, which has been digging into my earlobe and has left a nasty wound.

So I’ve moved the titanium ring into the right ear, and put a stud back in the left. I’m going to see if I can get another captive bead ring in Harvard Square; the left ear should be able to cope with a 16 gauge now, but I’m not sure what ring diameter I want. I’ll have to see if 3/8ths will work; 7/16ths is slightly larger than I like.

I’ve got the wireless router accessing my dial-up ISP. Next step is to get a wireless card for the other Mac, then I can get cable modem…

It seems there’s some incompatibility between the router and IE on the Mac. Oh well, maybe a firmware upgrade’ll fix it.

Went to a bi brunch at Pho Pasteur in Harvard Square. Excellent food. Afterwards I browsed the music stores and somehow managed to avoid spending any money.